During this past July’s Agile UX Retreat I had the opportunity to speak at length with Michael Long from ThoughtWorks about staffing and managing projects with poly-skilled team members. Our conversation tickled many of the concerns I’ve had with building project plans that separate and too specifically define design and development roles.
Atomic has a strong agile development culture and employs both designers and developers. We started as a development company and used to partner with design firms frequently. We started hiring designers in order to better control design capacity on projects. When we used to partner with outside firms, significant amounts of design would be done up-front and the designers would not have the opportunity to be stewards of their design during the development phase. Often times, design challenges would be discovered during the development effort and the partner firm could not be responsive due to their capacity commitments on other projects.
Having designers in-house offered many opportunities but also posed new operational and project management challenges. At a company level, we decided to manage design capacity separately from development capacity because we wanted to optimize design for responsiveness instead of throughput. We thought designers would be touching many projects throughout any given week. On projects, we tried keeping design backlogs separate from development backlogs because we suspected that development would always be the bottleneck on any project given a sufficient iteration zero.
It seemed natural to consider and manage design as a distinct role. Design is different from development so more management time, process and tools would be necessary to integrate designers with development teams. Right? That line of thinking makes me uneasy. Our development teams have historically been able to use simple tools to manage project scope and forecast project cost and completion time. I’m not convinced that adding designers to programming teams necessitates a project management overhaul. After speaking with Michael, I’m convinced that staffing and managing teams with poly-skilled members is a key to keeping project management streamlined and straightforward.
Please follow along in the coming weeks as I share my thoughts and experience on managing agile design and development projects.
Ideas for upcoming posts are:
- What makes a poly-skilled team
- Design lead and lag, shifting bottlenecks between design and development
- Managing for efficiency or effectiveness
- Integrating design and development backlogs
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